STI seeks to foreclose PWU’s Quezon City campus

MANILA, Philippines - STI Holdings, Inc. has started taking steps to take down another Philippine Women’s University (PWU) campus following an earlier petition to start the foreclosure of the latter’s Taft Ave. and Indiana St. branches.

In a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange, the Eusebio Tanco-led education firm said it filed with the regional trial court of Quezon City on Feb. 12 a petition to foreclose the Quezon City branch of PWU due to the latter’s failure to pay almost P1 billion in accumulated loans, interest, and expenses.

The petition sought the “extra-judicial foreclosure of real estate mortgage” over parcels of land registered under Unlad Resources Development Corp. located at Quezon City which include “all improvements located thereon, which properties were mortgaged in favor of STI Holdings as security under the facility agreement executed between PWU, as debtor, and STI Holdings as creditor” and “properties mortgaged in favor of STI Holdings and Attenborough Holdings Corp. as security under the omnibus agreement dated June 8, 2012 executed among Unlad, as debtor, and STI Holdings and Attenborough, as creditors.”

Aside from the Manila and Quezon City campuses, STI is also looking to foreclose Davao properties of PWU.

STI president Monico Jacob earlier said the filings are aimed at protecting the interest of STI and its shareholders.

“We were supposed to be have been paid in shares of stock way back in 2011 but even now, more than three years later, the first required step of increasing the authorized capital stock of Unlad Resources, PWU’s sister company that would absorb the school’s assets, was never taken by the Benitez group,” Jacob said in an earlier statement.

STI is demanding payment of P923 million from Benitez family, owners of PWU. The Benitez family, however, claims that their obligations is only P448 million, referring to the amount which Tanco’s camp is asking as “exorbitant and unacceptable.”